Fresh Reviews: "Mr. Popper's Penguins"

Rated PG for some rude humor of the sort that kids are wild about.

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This is going to be an incredibly tough review to write. Mainly because for over 25 years now I've been such a penguin fanatic (and, when possible, collector of any penguin-related item I can get my hands on) that I'm pretty much guaranteed to love any movie about penguins, even if on a purely objective basis it isn't very good. When I reviewed "March Of The Penguins" on my old Blogspot review blog, I just admitted defeat and let everyone know that what they were going to be getting was quite possibly unreliable due to my penguin fanaticism. I have the feeling that that might be the best way to go on this one, too, so... be advised.

In this version of the classic book (as distinguished from the actual book itself), Tom Popper is one of those dedicated businessmen who is so devoted to his work that his marriage has dissolved and he sees his two kids only on those occasional weekends. He had a distant but loving relationship with his globetrotting father, who always brought him back some sort of souvenir from his journeys. And dad's very last souvenir is going to change Tom Popper's life, restore his relationship with his children, maybe even revive his marriage... though it will wreak havoc on his work life. That souvenir, of dad's trip to the antarctic: six Gentoo penguins. In a New York apartment. Which forbids pets. But his kids love them, so he feels he has to keep them... and so the insanity begins.

You've all seen the "distant dad reconnects to his family" genre, likely more than once. This is another, and starring a man who probably was never meant to do sweet and sentimental in a movie. And it's about as predictable as all of the others... the ending is like a city bus, you can see it coming from a long way off. Nevertheless, I've long had a soft spot for the insanity of Jim Carrey, and "Mr. Popper's Penguins", while it tames his wildman approach a little, still allows him to be as thoroughly silly as ever. I would have liked to see a film that followed the original novel more closely (in which Popper was the ringmaster of a circus and the penguins became performers in his show), but I thought the same basic premise worked pretty well as modernized and adapted for this film. Most importantly, I laughed a lot, and when a comedy has that result, it's done its job.

A Gentoo penguin watching a bald eagle on a wildlife TV show and sadly flapping its own wings trying to fly that same way. A group of six penguins doing a surprisingly well-rehearsed and coordinated dance led by Carrey (until one of them topples over). A penguin swimming through Carrey's bathroom just like in his antarctic home after he (the penguin) has flooded it... don't ask how. And this doesn't even begin to deal with what happens when the penguins leave the apartment and get out into the world. Every few minutes there's some new chaos for the penguins to get into, to cause, or both. And I found very nearly all of it to be funny. I'll grant you that penguins can't really do much of what they're shown doing here, and I wouldn't want to be a parent trying to convince a kid who's seen this movie why they can't have a penguin for a pet. But, hey, HUMANS in a Jim Carrey movie almost never do what they actually do in real life, so why be fussy about some flightless sea birds?

There are other cast members, though it's easy to forget that. Carla Gugino (mom in the "Spy Kids" movies) as Carrey's ex-wife, Jeffrey Tambor as a businessman whose building Carrey snaps up for his firm, Philip Baker Hall as one of the partners in Carrey's firm, and Angela Lansbury as the owner of New York's Tavern on the Green, which Carrey has been assigned the task of obtaining if he wants to make partner himself. A decent and talented cast, but the fact is that this movie clearly belongs to Carrey and the penguins. And without ever getting into anything resembling actual characterization, their respective silly behavior was enough to keep me chuckling throughout. There's even a gag or two inserted into the actual closing credits themselves... I don't mean an additional scene, I mean an actual joke inserted as a LINE in the credits, so you actually have to be reading them to see it. Lucky I'm such a movie AND penguin geek. (And I'm glad to see that some movie people are still doing this sort of thing now that Zucker, Abrahams & Zucker of "Airplane!" fame don't seem to be working together any more.)

So I apologize if this review is totally useless for you in your attempt to decide if the movie is something you want to see. I am incapable of writing about it that way. All I can say is that I realized some problems it had but I loved it anyway. It did for me what a comedy is supposed to do. And every now and then, it surprised me. At least I can say with assurance that if you're a penguin fan yourself, you'll enjoy it. (The film uses actual penguins for the most part, aided by CGI at times when they're required to do something penguins can't really do, and the CGI is quite effective.) And I guess as far as these Hubpages reviews are concerned, you're probably fortunate that penguins aren't prominently featured in ALL movies.